For Steve, this contract wasn’t that important to the future of NeXT. While we would go on to pay Next about $5 million in royalties over the life of the contract, and were their first source of revenue, we were not central to his mission (Steve later teased me that he made more money collecting interest on his bank account than he made from me.). However, he had promised the developers 50%, he had said the number within earshot of everyone, and he wanted to be able to tell everyone he got what he wanted.

I had to make the business make sense financially. I just needed to make my 15% look like his 50%.